Guides: ARTH 490 Senior Thesis in Art History : Primary Sources

What is a Primary Source

An actual work of art, whether a painting or a building, is a primary source. A primary source is "first-hand" information, sources as close as possible to the origin of the information or idea under study. Primary sources are contrasted with secondary sources, works that provide analysis, commentary, or criticism on the primary source. In literary studies, primary sources are often creative works, including poems, stories, novels, and so on. In historical studies, primary sources include written works, recordings, or other source of information from people who were participants or direct witnesses to the events in question. Examples of commonly used primary sources include government documents, memoirs, personal correspondence, oral histories, and contemporary newspaper accounts.

Books written by the artist, such as a journal/diary/autobiography/letters are examples of primary sources. Newspaper and magazine articles written by someone who attended an opening or a talk by an artist would be primary sources. Books and articles written by friends and associates during the artist's lifetime would also be primary sources.

Primary Sources

Reviews of art exhibits and events can be found in newspapers and some older magazines.

Gale News Vault (Historical UK newspapers) This link opens in a new window
Search the Illustrated London News together with The Times Digital Archive 1785-1985.
Los Angeles Times This link opens in a new window
Indexing and full-text access to the Los Angeles Times. Covers 1985 to now.
Los Angeles Times (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new window
Every issue from 1881-1990 with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF.
New York Times (NYTimes.com) This link opens in a new window
**Access requires logging in with a Pepperdine email on the NY Times homepage. Find step-by-step log-in instructions on the access guide to log in. **
U.S. Major Dailies (ProQuest Newspapers) This link opens in a new window
Access to The New York Times (1980 - present), Washington Post (1987 - present), Los Angeles Times (1985 - present), Chicago Tribune, (1985 - present), and Wall Street Journal (1984 - present).
Newspaper Source This link opens in a new window
National & international papers include: The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Times (London), Toronto Star
Regional papers include: The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, Daily News (New York), San Jose Mercury News.
Television & radio news transcripts from CBS News, CNN, FOX News, NPR, and others.
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Features news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790. For help on how to use Nexis Uni, visit the research guide.This database is only available to current Pepperdine students, faculty, and staff.
Readers' Guide Retrospective 1890-1982 This link opens in a new window
Indexing includes full coverage of the original print volumes of Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature™.
British Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Provides page images and searchable full text for approximately 500 British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th centuries (1681-1920).

Primary Resources Found Online

Stories Of The Italian Artists From Vasari (1908)
Published around 1550, Vasari wrote some of the first biographies of many famous Italian artists. This is the 1913 English translation by E. L. Seeley. Vasari is an important resource because he knew some of the artists personally, and at least lived during the same era as many of the others. He is particularly proud of his friendship with Michelangelo, but he never met many of the artists and is content to tell legends about them that he heard second-hand.
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an important work for any student of Renaissance art; however, it must always be taken with a grain of salt and in light of contrary evidence.
Artists' Books Online
An online repository of facsimiles, metadata, and criticism. From University of Virginia.
Digital Scriptorium
An image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.
Presently viewable on the DS website are records for 5,300 manuscripts and for 24,300 images.
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The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.

As a visual catalog, DS allows scholars to verify with their own eyes cataloguing information about places and dates of origin, scripts, artists, and quality. Special emphasis is placed on the touchstone materials: manuscripts signed and dated by their scribes. DS records manuscripts that traditionally would have been unlikely candidates for reproduction. It fosters public viewing of materials otherwise available only within libraries. Because it is web-based, it encourages interaction between the knowledge of scholars and the holdings of libraries to build a reciprocal flow of information. Digital Scriptorium looks to the needs of a very diverse community of medievalists, classicists, musicologists, paleographers, diplomatists and art historians. At the same time Digital Scriptorium recognizes the limited resources of libraries; it bridges the gap between needs and resources by means of extensive rather than intensive cataloguing, often based on legacy data, and sample imaging.

Digital Scriptorium institutional partners have instituted a governance structure to plan jointly for the future of the program, in terms of scope, sustainability, and content.

Presently viewable on the DS website are records for 5,300 manuscripts and for 24,300 images.

Tiles on the Digital Scriptorium homepage and throughout the site are from Berkeley, University of California, Bancroft Library, UCB 059.

Online Archive of California (OAC) This link opens in a new window
Descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and the University of California (UC) campuses.
Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives has contributed a number of collections to the OAC.

Locating Contemporary Artists' Works Online

Locate artists' works on the Internet using a search engine such as Google; or visit a site that collects information about works from over 180,000 artists: Artnet.com

Artsy, a resource for collection and education, aims to make all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.